Living In Land Of Steady Habits Is No Party

Laurence D. Cohen and Gina Barreca | Irreconcilable Differences

LARRY Gina, we devote quite a bit of space to important things, such as vampires and what's wrong with women - an inexhaustible subject. I'm a political kind of guy, but this is Connecticut. Politics is sufficiently dull as to send the normal person running for a conversation about the Red Sox or what's wrong with women. In the midst of an inspiring Tea Party revolution, what does Connecticut do? Re-elect every Democratic incumbent it can find - and then proceed to elect a Democratic governor, just in case there was some tax somewhere we had forgotten to raise. While the New Jersey governor is chopping off the heads of recalcitrant state employees, while the governor of Wisconsin is slapping around state employee labor unions, what is Connecticut's guy doing? Promising not to lay off one single state employee for his entire first term of office, no matter what the economic conditions. The General Assembly passes the thing and the discouraged Republican state chairman says he's not running again. There's no marching in the streets or hints of a GOP/Tea Party revolution. Dull. Might as well write about poetry and what's wrong with women. The solution might be nonpartisan elections. If the voters are going to be docile and tax-and-spend is a permanent affliction, why muck things up with the pretense of partisan politics? That would leave a lot more time to talk about what's wrong with women. How about it, Gina. No party labels. We could sneak in a few competent, apolitical dorks who would spend all that tax money on something other than fringe benefits for UConn professors. Oops. I'm sorry. GINA That's it, Larry! Let's get people who ACTIVELY know nothing about politics to run the government! Good plan. While we're at it, let's also get our tonsils removed by bakers, our cars fixed by pole-dancers, our hair cut by taxidermists. What was that, Larry? You already get your hair cut by a taxidermist? Oops! I'm sorry. Why is politics an arena where folks trust amateurs over professionals? This sort of distorted thinking might cause an otherwise reasonable citizen to support for president a moron who couldn't even hold down one term as a governor. This might cause a perfectly sensible individual to believe that forming a complete sentence even in one's own tongue is, like, totally unnecessriate. (Or a word that sounds like that. Stop being such a gotcha dork about language-y stuff!) Members of the Tea Party - who, by the way, could not tell you when Ceylon became Sri Lanka and think Earl Grey should be arrested because he is said to be "infused with Bergamot" - seem to see ignorance as a virtue. They celebrate inexperience and applaud slack-jawed, glassy-eyed naivete. Was I out of town when abject stupidity become an American value? LARRY Gina, what do you have to "know" about politics to be a Connecticut politician? Most folks favor the death penalty, but we never execute anyone. Most people favor the sale of booze on Sundays, but we can't do it. A national survey just ranked Connecticut's highways as among the worst in the nation. Nobody cares. We'll have a cool bus from Hartford to New Britain. A national survey of airports ranked Bradley as among the worst smaller airports in the nation. We don't care about that, either. At the local level in many states, "nonpartisan" means competent, without the partisan ideology. Connecticut seems to have settled for being a mediocre, expensive, suburban office park, tended to by pampered state employees. Democrats can handle that. Republicans can handle that. Legislators and a governor with no label at all can handle that. It takes a special kind of person to be really, really good at leading an expensive, mediocre enterprise. Why limit the pool to arbitrary party labels? It's like the mantra from city managers: There's no Democratic or Republican way to fill a pothole. GINA Awww, Larry, really - you want to set up an Express Lane for Death Row? It's not enough that people of conscience have wrestled their better angels to the ground and decided that there's no alternative? If we have Twelve Items or Fewer, you want us to kill 'em quicker and get it over with? There are indeed partisan ways to fill a pothole. You're kidding only yourself if you believe otherwise. Republicans blame "potholes" on drug abuse by young black and Hispanic males. The GOP wants them imprisoned and then put on work-release programs in order to get our roads back to where they were in That Great Time before 1963. I know, Larry, that you believe Democrats, in contrast, want to even-out any problems we might have when driving our Priuses over Connecticut's highways by having organic farmers grow gravel. But that's not true. Democrats want to level the playing field (and our roads) by making sure that fair and equitable wages are paid to workers who know how to make the state stronger, better, more productive and - yes, even if it means strengthening our educational system - smarter. Those are American values worth voting for, Larry. You should try it.